Facilitating University–Industry Interaction by Visually Showcasing Researcher Profiles via metadata

University–industry interaction (UII) has grown significantly over the past two decades. Yet, contacting universities to establish collaboration continues to be perceived as challenging by the industry. This paper studies the challenges associated with UII for analysing how metadata, taxonomies and visualizations in research information management systems (RIMS) may support UII for large enterprises. The first step was a systematic literature review conducted to understand the challenges associated with UII. The sec-ond step was interviews with R&D managers from three large enterprises to extend our knowledge about this industry group. The results showed that the primary channel for establishing UII was through personal connections. The informants saw the RIMS as an important tool for browsing research literature and ex-ploring research groups to gain insights into research topics and individual researchers. In terms of metadata, the findings showed that multi-disciplinarity and high-level granularity were important aspects. Furthermore, the visualisation of relationships and description of international collaborations was per-ceived a useful indicator of researchers’ overall quality and impact. Similarly, metadata describing job ti-tles, departments, and citations was central for judging the credibility of experts. An interesting finding was that enterprise managers found it difficult to develop personal relationships with relevant academic experts. Future studies may benefit from interviews with HR management professionals exploring how to support recruitment by using metadata and taxonomies.